Monthly Archives: July 2016

This summer a small exhibition in the Blackwell Hall of the Weston Library on Broad Street, Oxford, will tell the story of The English Garden: Views and Visitors. It also marks the 300th anniversary of the birth of the man behind England’s green and pleasant land, the landscape designer and entrepreneur Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown.

What Shakespeare has done for English letters, so Brown has done for English landscape. Yet we know what Shakespeare created was fiction; even if his fiction was so convincing that when we think of Richard III or Henry V, we think firstly of Shakespeare’s characters, rather than the historical record. With Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown, the story is slightly different as his landscapes look so natural that it is hard to see the hand of the artist at work at all. Perhaps Brown’s success has been such that he has almost damned himself to historical obscurity through creating a product so good, subsequent generations of visitors have given nature herself the credit.

2016 gives us the opportunity to re-assert the balance, and bring Brown into the popular pantheon of English artistic heroes.

The county of Oxfordshire is pretty much where it all started for Capability Brown. Thirteen miles north of Oxford lies Kiddington Hall. This is where Capability Brown appeared, aged 23 in 1739, with introductions from his former employer, the Northumbrian landowner Sir William Lorraine. Kiddington’s owner, Sir Charles Browne, gave this other Brown his first big break in the south of England. Lancelot was involved in the formation of the lawns and lake in front of the house. The lake’s source was the River Glyme, which he would return to some twenty years later in his career to create the magnificent lake at Blenheim Palace.

View from South Portico at Stowe (Oliver Cox)

Two years later, Brown found himself twenty-five miles north east of the city of dreaming spires as the new Head Gardener of Stowe. By 1741 this landscape was already one of the most famous in Europe. Jacques Rigaud’s fifteen engravings, published in July 1739, ensured that Stowe’s landscape was broadcast far beyond Buckinghamshire. In the far corner of Lord Cobham’s estate at Stowe, Brown started work on creating an ideal valley, through which Cobham’s visitors could walk and imagine themselves as the poets of Classical antiquity. Excavating approximately 24,000 cubic yards of earth, Brown’s male and female labourers were creating landscape on the largest scale.

Brown’s long career, stretching for the next forty-two years until his death in 1783, is significant for a huge range of factors. Most importantly he codified the idea of the ‘natural’ in landscape design. The new exhibition at Compton Verney, celebrating Brown’s work there for the 14th Baron Willoughby de Broke from 1768, efficiently captures his style.

Compton Verney, viewed across Brown’s Lake (Oliver Cox)

Brown’s landscapes were typically simple, uncluttered and restrained, generally comprising sweeping pasture bordered with tree clumps, perimeter shelter-belts and screens of trees. He swept away the formal parterres and the classically-inspired allusions of the previous age, but also planted thousands of trees – predominantly oak, ash and elm. The resultant landscape was perfectly designed to encourage those 18th-century pursuits of hunting, shooting and carriage-riding.

In 2016, Brown’s image of England – appearing at the beginning of every episode of Downton Abbey thanks to his work at Highclere Castle – has achieved an unprecedented global reach.

We all at the Voltaire Foundation express heartfelt solidarity with our friends and colleagues in France, following the brutal and tragic events in Nice, committed on ‘Bastille Day’, a day of national celebration of Republican values.

« Translation de Voltaire au Panthéon français » (1791)

These Republican values are also European values, inextricable from the legacy of Voltaire. In July 1791, Voltaire’s remains were transferred to the Panthéon, in what is remembered as one of the Revolution’s greatest public ceremonies. The hearse made its way first to the Place de la Bastille, and the crowd watched as the coffin was placed on a highly symbolic pile of rubble, the stones of the Bastille prison which had been torn down in 1789. Next day, the procession that wound its way to the Panthéon included a model of the hated Bastille, Houdon’s statue of Voltaire seated, and all seventy volumes of the Kehl edition of Voltaire’s complete works. On the coffin was an inscription reclaiming Voltaire as a hero of the Revolution:

Our digital editions are based on high quality PDFs provided by the BNF’s Gallica online library (1770 and 1780 editions) and the Bodleian’s Oxford Google Books Project (1774 edition). A preliminary search interface has been built using the ARTFL Project’s PhiloLogic software and can be accessed here: Raynal search form. Users can query one or all of the above editions, which represent the first publicly available full-text digital edition(s) of the Histoire des deux Indes. In the coming months we will release a new version of the database running on ARTFL’s state-of-the-art PhiloLogic4 system, along with a preliminary ‘intertextual interface’ that will aim to incorporate the text of the three separate editions into one reading interface.

Title page and frontispiece of the 1780 edition of Raynal’s Histoire des deux Indes (Gallica).

Diderot, Hornoy, and the 1780 edition

What is perhaps most exciting about these new digital resources is the inclusion of a unique 1780 edition of the Histoire des deux Indes recently made available by the BNF. Acquired at public auction in March 2015, this particular edition had been conserved since the late 18th century in the private library of Alexandre Marie Dompierre d’Hornoy (1742-1828). A lawyer at the Parlement de Paris and great-nephew of Voltaire – he in fact inherited Jean-Baptiste Pigalle’s infamous nude statue of Voltaire upon his great-uncle’s death – Hornoy corresponded with many of the philosophes, Diderot included. His copy of the Histoire contains pencil marks in the margins of some passages, an unremarkable fact, perhaps, were it not for a note written by Hornoy just above a three-page insert at the beginning of the first tome. The handwritten tables included in the insert list all the sections marked in pencil over the four volumes of text: ‘mourceaux qui sont de M. Diderot’, Hornoy writes, ‘marqués en crayon par Mme de Vandeul’. Madame de Vandeul was, of course, Diderot’s daughter.

The existence of such an annotated volume of the Histoire was posited in the 19th century, notably by Joseph Marie Quérard in his Supercheries littéraires dévoilées(5 vols., 1845-1856). Quérard claimed that there supposedly existed a copy of the 1780 edition on which Diderot himself had marked in pencil all the passages that belonged to him [1]. According to Quérard, this copy became the property of Madame de Vandeul shortly after Diderot’s death. Whether or not the copy acquired by the BNF is the same as that owned by Vandeul we cannot say for sure, but Herbert Dieckmann, in his inventory of the ‘fonds Vandeul’, also mentions the hypothetical existence of a copy of the in-4o edition (e.g. 1780) that was purportedly annotated by hand, but that had since been lost [2].

Some preliminary experiments

While consensus as to the validity of Hornoy’s assertion that the marked sections are in fact those authored by Diderot will most likely take years to accrue, we can begin, using the new digital edition, to ask some basic questions as to the authorship claims indicated in the text. Thanks to extensive markup in TEI-XML notation, sections purportedly belonging to Diderot are clearly indicated, and perhaps more importantly, can be extracted as one test corpus. Using some basic statistical measures drawn from authorship attribution studies, or Stylometry, we can begin to think about how the ‘Diderot’ sections may, or may not, differ stylistically – i.e. in terms of comparative word usage over the most common words, an established metric of ‘authorship’ in stylometry and forensic linguistics – from the rest of the text.

Working with the Centre for Literary and Linguistic Computing at the University of Newcastle (Australia), and in particular with their Intelligent Archive software for stylistic and statistical text analysis, we extracted the top 200 words for each ‘author’ (e.g. those drawn from sections putatively by Diderot, and the remaining ‘Raynal’ sections). As a result, we were left with 4 ‘Diderot’ tomes (containing all of the text marked in pencil) and 4 ‘Raynal’ tomes (containing the remainder), representing their unique word lists over the entire edition. For a first preliminary test, we ran a cluster analysis on the 8 tomes to see if they would cluster together or separately:

Cluster analysis works by separating (or clustering) the most similar texts first and the most distinct last, in this case into 2 branches. A division like the one above, clearly separated into two distinct ‘trees’ is a very clear indication that the texts in each of the two branches are highly likely to be those of two different authors.

Principal component analysis (PCA) provides another method of examining our corpora. PCA is a procedure for identifying a smaller number of uncorrelated variables, called ‘principal components’, from a large set of data. The goal of PCA is to explain the maximum amount of variance with the fewest number of principal components. In our case, it is a technique that allows for the first two principal components of our two sets of texts, i.e. their word variance, to be plotted on a bi-axial or two-dimensional graph. One of these plots (using the 100 most frequent words of the full text) with both text corpora divided into 10,000 word blocks, is shown below.

The disparity in size of our two test corpora meant that while there were 68 text sections for Raynal (in green), there were only 14 for Diderot (in blue). Nonetheless, the separation between the two authorial sets is almost complete, with just two of the Diderot sections located in the outer fringes of the Raynal set. Since the word variables underlying this plot were the 100 most frequent words of the whole text, this is a convincing stylistic division, one that suggests a strong distinction in terms of authorship signal between the two sets.

In order to account for the size discrepancy between the two corpora, we ran another PCA test but this time we increased the number of Diderot sections by segmenting his text into 5,000 word blocks and running these against the previous Raynal 10,000-word sections. This plot is shown below:

Here we see the same sort of authorial/stylistic separation as we saw above, but this time (with the Diderot sections halved in size) the distinction is even stronger, as there is only one section located within the Raynal set of entries, indicating an even greater likelihood that the sections marked in pencil were written by a different author than the rest of the 1780 edition.

These are obviously very rudimentary experiments, but they nonetheless indicate several promising future avenues of exploration. Moving forward, we intend to apply a full suite of computational and stylistic approaches to the 1780 edition and its predecessors, including sequence alignment tools developed by ARTFL, text collation software, and the MEDITE system developed by the labex OBVIL at the Sorbonne for computational genetic criticism. All of these approaches will allow us to explore the textual evolution of the Histoire from 1770 to 1780 in an unprecedented manner, as well as its relationship to other Enlightenment texts and text collections such as Electronic Enlightenment, TOUT Voltaire, and the Encyclopédie.

– Glenn Roe

*I would especially like to thank Alexis Antonia and the Centre for Literary and Linguistic Computing at Newcastle for their generous help with the above stylistic analyses.

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Welcome to the Voltaire Foundation’s blog. We are a world leader for eighteenth-century scholarship and a research department at the University of Oxford. We publish the definitive edition of the Complete Works of Voltaire (Œuvres complètes de Voltaire), as well as Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment (previously SVEC), the foremost series devoted to Enlightenment studies, and the correspondences of several key French thinkers.

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Written in honor of Dale K. Van Kley, these essays examine how Jansenist belief shaped Enlightenment ideas, cultural identities, social relations and politics in France throughout the long eighteenth century.

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